


anything you lose comes round in another form

by sassymajesty



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 12:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3729304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassymajesty/pseuds/sassymajesty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We must realize that we seldom meet a person by accident. Almost everyone we meet in this lifetime is an old acquaintance we met in a distant past." — Jaime T. Lichauco</p>
            </blockquote>





	anything you lose comes round in another form

**Author's Note:**

> For [Liz](http://aunicorndumbass.tumblr.com/)

**1712**

Loving her is a sin, you’re well aware of this.

You have dark red angry marks on your back to remind you every time you put on your corset – the fresh newer ones are red, you reminisce, lost in a sea of yellow and ugly greenish purple. You got those marks from your priest, but you don’t blame him, as he was merely following orders from your mother.

Your mother, with her hostile womb that gave you as her only daughter and her pose oh so very proper, had walked in on you sealing your lips against hers. It had been an innocent touch, a wonder – you were to marry a royal, and you wanted to know what it was to have someone so close to you. She had been your best friend for years, if not the only that survived all the balls thrown in your honor, and she had been willing.

But the flogging hadn’t been due a mere kiss. It had happened when your father – yes, your incredibly understanding father who taught you to tell the time by the sun and how to ride your favorite horse – had listened against your door, heard the whispers and gasps as layers and layers of clothing were shed and wandering hands rose goosebumps, and when you spoke, too loud for the dead silence that embraces the evening, and let her know you’d give up everything to be with her.

Still, you brace yourself against the leather that lashes against the fragile skin of your back, for when you’re back, she’ll be there with towels soaked in fresh water and herbs.

You confess your sins and say you regret them, but you would never feel shame to relish in her hands, in the mere sight of her.

As you walk toward the prison that once was your home, corset digging in bloody wounds, you’re greeted with a scene that should never be.

She’s leaving.

The only light in your life no longer shines as the horse trots calmly away, carrying her on its back, uncaring about the new fresh wounds that cut the flesh from inside out.

**2015**

Your leather jacket feels more like an armor than piece of clothing. It clads your shoulders and you’re rigid, spine tense and ribs trembling as you raise your hand to knock on her door.

You have a weird sense of déjà vu. Has this happened before? Have you come over unannounced just to break her heart?

She greets you with her reading glasses on and a smile so warm you almost change your mind, you almost – almost – smile back and throw your arms around her neck, begging for some of whatever food she’s cooking that smells so good and asking if you can stay the night.

You barely recognize your own voice as you say, “we need to talk” in a much somber tone than you had first intended. You watch as her smile falls from her face, worry casting grey clouds over her sunshine like grin.

As she steps aside and lets you in, you’re greeted by her dog and the little thing wiggles his tail so much you almost forget what you  came here to say, crouching to scratch his belly, delighted to hear the woof that fills the room. Before she has the chance to crouch next to you and give you a kiss, you stand up, clutching to the lapels of your jacket as her dog walks happily to his box – you’ll miss him. maybe you can still visit.

Knuckles go white with how tight you grasp the leather, as if could keep her heart from breaking if you just grip it tight enough. You switch from a foot to another and the uncomfortable silence lingers as you watch her smile turning into a frown, her brows drawing together, her breathing quickening in worry.

Your breathing quickens as well as you whisper, “I’m going to London for my residency,” and no one would know how the guilt corrodes your insides, leaving a taste of bile in its awake.

It’s not a lie – you have been accepted to work with one of the greatest and brightest neurosurgeons, and saying no would ended up being your bitterest regret.

However, you could make it work – or at least try. Washington is not _that_ far from London, you’ve been further apart than this before and you made it work. You should try to make this last, and you _would –_ if only you didn’t feel like her dead grandmother’s ring on your fourth finger is your shackles, if only the wedding plans didn’t feel like writing your own death.

So you cling to this excuse and you know it’s too weak to break you two off, too flimsy to stand the weight of a broken engagement, but you try it nonetheless.

You don’t expect her face to light up, her smile to widen again and all her worries wash away from her face. She whispers back, “Cambridge wants me to teach there,” and your resolution wavers.

A new start may help you – you imagine yourself hiking on a Saturday morning insisting to link hands with her even though the path is cruel, you imagine breakfast in bed with the newswoman talking in the funny British accent as she tries to mimic it and you laugh until your belly hurts. You imagine a life never lived, a life in which you reconnect with her and savage what is left of your sanity and pride.

But this can’t be.

You find yourself without excuses, so you murmur in a tone barely audible to your own ears, “I want to break up.”

**1922**

It’s 3pm and the wine you had with lunch morphs into vodka and tonic, and it might be too early for a proper young lady as yourself to be drinking in a bar with more male friends than female – not that you have any care about your reputation, or any worries about what might happen.

Your boyfriend’s hand rests on your thigh and if your dress hikes up more than it should, it doesn’t bother you.

This is Paris and you’re finally free from the unbearable grasp your final exams held you on, the drink on your hand is your second and nowhere near your last and your boyfriend’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin tagged along – you’re nothing if not intrigued by her.

Her curls cascade over her shoulders and down her back as she throws her head back, laughing at something someone said and she looks so different from the tightly put together girl you had lunch with. Her neck is long, her jaw is sharp and her smile comes easy after the few drinks she had. You find yourself laughing along and imagining what it would be like to kiss the skin under her ear.

You’re young and adventurous, and your future sister-in-law had told you no more than a few days ago what she had done in Italy a week ago and you want to try it.

Changing places with your boyfriend – who has a hand settled respectfully on the low of your back and keeps it there – so you’re standing next to her and you talk yourself into it and washes your fears down with hard liquor. Your eyes travel down her body and she catches your gaze accusingly but instead of a reproach or disgusted glare, you find her tongue slipping between her lips to wet them.

Any excuse is good enough to touch her arm, hands, back. When your whole group moves to a more private booth, you make sure to sit beside her – she’s tall and sunburnt and you can smell the summer air in her hair as she turns to smile at you. You’re about to reach for her hand with a silly excuse when someone suggest dinner and you realize you’ve been craving this woman for an entire day. You would’ve been ashamed, but she looks to your lips, lingering gaze burning the plump skin.

She wants you too.

Her cousin nudges you to get up and move to a different restaurant, some place more alive, and you realize that when the alcohol in your system dies down, so will your courage.

Looking at her from head to toe, you settle your drinks on the table and grabs her hand, excusing both of you to the bathroom with some ladylike reason and a knowing look from your boyfriend’s sister.

You stare pointedly at her for a moment, silently asking the question you’re still too sober to ask out loud. You see the hungry look on her dark eyes and it matches yours, so you pull her toward the ladies’ room, praying no one else will be there.

But it’s 7pm on a Tuesday and you’re two ladies in a less than respectful place – of course there’s no one there.

You drop all pretense as your hands find soft skin and you smile when she leans in before you do. All the wild daydreams you had during the afternoon come alive as she grips your shoulder when you back her up against a wall, tasting like the wine she sipped during hours. Your hand slides down her side – curious, tentative – and she sighs into your mouth. A matching sigh leaves you and a shiver runs down your back when she tugs on your hair as you presses her harder against the wall, the alcohol in your bloodstream making you bolder.

You don’t come out for air and neither does she – it might be the lack of oxygen but you feel something burning on your chest, constricting it so hard that tears prickle behind your closed eyelids. You feel like you’re finally doing something for yourself, simply because you want it to and not because you’re expected to.

You want to be with her like this every day of your life.

That’s an unwise wish to have in the first place – she lives in Russia and you’re Parisian, you’re to be married and you’ve heard someone suggest that so is she. But her skin is unbelievably soft, so much softer than a man’s ever could, and _god_ how could you give it up now, when you just found it.

You kiss her deeper as you reminisce you’ll marry someone in a few years and it won’t be to her. She’ll go back to Russia, you’ll go back to school. But for now, you kiss her, tasting stars and promises never made – a promise of not now, but maybe, hopefully, in another life.

**2104**

You clutch her limp hand in between yours and you feel her bones pressing hard against her fragile skin. You muse, she could hurt you in a tickling fight – but lately she can’t even lift a spoon to her mouth, tickling will have to wait.

She lost half her weight by the time she started losing her hair and hasn’t gained any back.

Dropping your head forward, you close your eyes, unable to watch her greenish skin glow under fluorescent light as she struggles to breathe, even with the oxygen being pumped into her lungs every few seconds. Tears sting the back of your eyes as you try to pull yourself together, find hope where there’s none.

The accident hadn’t been a freaky one – it was a 1.8 in a 5.0 scale with a fancy but weird name they use to describe radiation accidents. A mishap, they had called it. 1.8 was light enough to give you severe cancer in a few years, but it was rare for people to get intoxicated and _dying_ so fast like she was. She had been too close to the source and with a immune system too weak to come out of it with only cancer.

You both had laughed about it over coffee – she had found _coffee_ , in this time and age – about how cancer had once been a death sentence, the holy grail of possible bad news, the worst case scenario. And now it was actually good news – cancer was treatable, exposure to absurd levels of radiation within seconds was not.

The doctors had given her five weeks – that is, with all the meds and treatments, and three different times of cleaning so they could wash away the most radiation.

She had made it through four.

Four weeks of waking up in the middle of the night to retch without anything coming up because she hasn’t eating more than a few crackers during the day. Four weeks of her combing through her curls in hopes to make a nice braid, to at least look more alive than she felt, only to have tufts of hair falling on the ground. Four weeks of dropping pound after pound after pound, almost visibly, no matter what vitamins she put him. Four weeks of you waking to her sounds – sobs, dry heaving, anything but laughter – and trying to soothe her relentlessly and hugging her tight until she fell asleep, whispering “I wish I was dead” in your ear.

You stay by her side in what you know must be her last days – as you know she would do by you, were the roles reversed. You only have each other. Your mother had passed down some genetic mutations due to exposure to radiation and she died shortly after giving birth to you, and your father had died in a radiation accident a few years ago. The same had happened to her.

You straighten up and trace a finger lightly down her arm – the IVs make her veins darker and her skin is too pale, and it makes you feel like the mere sight will make you sick as well. She hasn’t opened her eyes in two days, but she squeezes your hand weakly and you squeeze it right back.

You don’t dare to get your hopes up – it’s just a muscle twitch.

When she flatlines, no more than twenty minutes after you felt her hand responding to yours, you breathe in deeply. It won’t take long for the same to happen to you.

But you’ll be alone.

**79**

It’s a warm day. Your calendar says it’s time for the leaves to turn brown and fall, but you still wear your summer gown, your shoulders exposed to the twilight. You’re playing with twigs to pass the time, aimlessly drawing random patters in the sand as you wait for her.

Meeting after supper had started almost innocently – just two friends, strolling down main street and off to the fields to catch fireflies.

You’re perfectly content with this set up until she starts talking too fondly of a guy her parents had introduced her to, some mediocre warrior. She’s telling about him and you’re thinking you could definitely wield a sword better than him, and then you’re shutting her up by kissing her. She kisses you back for no more than a moment and draws back, leaving you wanting and confused.

It takes her four days to meet you again. When she does, she kisses you until your mouth is swollen and your tongue is tingling and you feel your lightheaded.

Then you fall back into a well-rehearsed routine, meeting after supper and heading down the fields. But now, instead of walking side by side, you link arms, and you no longer catch fireflies. Now you just let them be and they thank you by casting light in the scene that is almost always the same – you two talking and breaking into giggles that morph into happy kisses.

You’re early – you skipped supper and the sun is still high in the sky as you draw in the sand for countless minutes until you hear your name being called out in what you’ve found out is your favorite sound in the world – her voice. You look up, forgetting about your drawing that had just started taking shape, and you smile. She’s wearing a braid and you’re so in love your heart aches as she makes her way to you and she’s barely within reach when you embrace her tight in your arms, your hands finding their way to her hair, messing it up before your lips even touch.

For a few hours, you’re hers and she’s yours. Nothing else matters.

You walk a well-known path, hands linked until you find your favorite stop – under an oak tree, watching the sun setting behind the mountain uphill.

As you settle against the tree, holding her in your arms, you’re certain you could never love anyone else, never ever be with anyone else. You tell her that and she turns, giving her back to the sunset and burying her eyes in yours, “So don’t,” she whispers as her gown slides easily over her shoulders and you’re greeted with a sight that a hundred sunsets couldn’t beat.

You slide out of yours as well and pulls her closer, watching as her brown curls turn auburn in the early evening light, and you wonder what would it take for her parents to see you’re worthy of her. If you had to kill that sloppy warrior, so be it.

As her hands slide in between your hands, you can’t think straight anymore. Your head is in the clouds and you don’t hear the screams from the village, don’t see the smoke coming from the mountain, nor the lava – not until it’s too late.

**1335**

The winter is unforgiven and you’ve lost count of how many men you’ve lost on your table – some of them gone before they even touched it. You’re their healer, but it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much healing these days. What you do, most of the time, is to put people out of their misery.

You lift your head from your arms you have in top of a desk as you hear worried shouts and shuffling outside your tent and it doesn’t take long for two men to come in carrying a limp body and all but tossing it over your table. You fist your hands into tight balls, a lump already forming in your throat with the thought of sinking your scalpel into yet another throat.

One of the soldiers has his arm in a makeshift brace, but he comes in walking so you figure he’ll live. You start to make your way toward him only to be waved away, insisting that you care after the woman first, that she’s in worst shape.

It surprises you, to learn the body dripping blood is a woman’s – not that you don’t have women in the field, you take whatever help you can get, but no woman has ever gone into such a bloody battle.

You clear the room – no one seems to recognize her as a friend, and you won’t have twenty men staring as you undress and try to access the damage those bastards did. As you open her blood soaked coat, you find the last thing you would ever expect – a red cross sewed on the fabric over her chest.

Holding a gasp in, you turn to leave, to warn someone, to take this burden off your back, but she grabs your wrist and murmurs in the weakest voice, “Please, don’t let me die.”

The accent is clear in her voice.

She’s English and either a traitor of the English crown or you’re about to save an enemy.

You nod and cut through her clothes, peeling it from her wounds and setting the patch of fabric with the red cross aside so you can burn it later. She looks at you with pleading eyes and you swear to yourself to save her before her eyes roll back into the sockets, pain overcoming her as you remove ammo fragments and sew her skin back together.

It takes her a day and a half to wake up and you save two, lose five and fix minor wounds from countless warriors.

You thank God you’re alone with her when she wakes up and asks for water – the word alone would’ve given her way, the T too pronounced, the tongue not rolling enough.

But you give her water and ask her name – it’s posh and English and you cringe with the thought of what your comrades may do if they found out.

She’s strong and certainly doesn’t lack the vitamins the Scottish army does, and she heals quickly. You take upon yourself to care after her – to hide her – and you take interest in her as she does in you. She seems fascinated by your healing skills and you learn about her taste in literature and favorite childhood games before you find out she’s the English General’s wife. It sounds weird to think of her as someone else’s, as anyone other than her own person.

You promise to teach her how to stitch someone up and she entertains you until late at night with songs and stories of the land you’re fighting against. She talks up a storm when you’re alone and follows your strict rules about how she must not talk in the company of others.

Soon, she becomes the help you never had in the infirmary, fixing up minor wounds as you care after the more serious ones. The soldiers have taken a liking to her, promptly ignoring how she’s never been among them before.

You’re not winning the war, but your losses are fewer and further apart and you wonder why.

You wonder until someone says the General misses his wife and can’t rule anymore. You wonder until someone brings in a flyer with her drawing on it.

You wonder.

You wonder until walk in your tent and find her thrown askew, her limbs bent in odd angles, thick warm blood gushing through the wounds behind your beloved friend’s white and blue clothing.

**2232**

You fall from the sky and burn three hundred of her men before you even learn about her.

She’s not fond of you when you first meet and she’s hardly your favorite – but an alliance with her people means safety, so you swallow your prejudice and nod along with everything she says.

She’s the commander and somehow you became the leader of your own people. “You were born for this. Same as me”, she had told you matter-of-factly and you had believed her – it’s easier to believe in fate, even if everything you’ve been through since you were fifteen has nothing to do with fate.

You go from foes to friends in a short time and when you say life should be about more than just surviving, she believes you and kisses you. You let go of yourself and all the heaviness of your duties for just a second and sinks into the kiss.

Suddenly, all the sneers and long hateful stares make sense. And you understand your own feelings, that fire in the pit of your stomach every time your eyes were drawn to her lips – her ridiculously plump lips that feel so soft pressed against yours.

You pull back and you miss her warmth instantly, but the pain for the love you killed stings the back of your throat and you don’t want to tinge whatever you might have between you with any kind of bitterness.

War calls and you leave the intimacy of your tent and go into the battle field – she smiles at you once, underneath her commander façade and _gods,_ you almost falls right then.

When war looks like a lot of waiting, she invites you to the capital and tells you it’ll change the way you think about the people who had grew up in a land impossible to you. But she’s wrong and you tell her so – she had already changed it, with her smiles hard to come by but priceless when they did. You’ve seen the soft side, the compassion her people was capable of feeling, you’ve seen underneath her armor and you’ve loved every bit. She smiles once again – third time since you’ve kissed and you want to be selfish and kiss her again.

You want to forget about how heavy your burden is and how your back aches from the weight of it – but you can’t.

Answering her smile with one of your own, you allow yourself to think past the war. You imagine what it’d be like to follow her to the capital, your friends and new found allies by your side, and to spend some time with her, bared of all pretense and all war paint.

You let your mind wander for a moment to a time where peace reigns. You imagine her sleepy face freed of worries and you imagine how she would play with the children in the street, letting them put flowers in her braids. Maybe one day, if you’re lucky, you’ll see her laughing so hard she can’t breathe. Your mind creates images of her – without armor and anything else but a dress, talking about new recipes she wants to try instead of how many casualties they had, hiking for fun and not survival.

Peaceful times alongside of her seems like something worth living for.

But your foolish mind didn’t count on her breaking her promise to you, and as she says the words of your own people to you, you swear you see some hurt in her eyes. It can’t be and you know it – if this was true, she wouldn’t have walked away from you, she wouldn’t have left you alone to fend for yourself and all of your people.

The words she said to you burn in your heart, more than it ever did. And you find yourself hoping you won’t meet again, not in this life and not in another.

It all feels too much.

It feels like you’ve been hurting each other for thousands of years.

And it has to end.


End file.
